A son of Souffles ? Abdellah Taïa and the poetics of illiteracy in Vivre à ta lumière

Abstract

In 1966, ten years after Morocco gained independence from French colonial rule, a group of decolonial writers founded the journal Souffles (1966–1972). Its mission was to deconstruct the suffocating binaries, concepts, and essentialisms that trapped Morocco in an enduring French cultural imperialism or hermetic cultural atavism. In this article, I draw a critical genealogy between leading Moroccan anti-imperial thinkers including Abdellatif Laâbi, Abdelkébir Khatibi, Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine, and Abdellah Taïa’s latest novel Vivre à ta lumière (2022). Just as the Souffles generation exposed the politics of illiteracy that had cemented the conditions of oppression during the Protectorate and its violent aftermath under the reign of Hassan II, so I argue that Taïa inhabits his mother’s illiterate tongue in the novel as a decolonial language that refuses to make itself legible to monologic forms of European, or Moroccan neocolonial, intellectualism. Attentive to the metatextual tropes of language, words, letters, scripts, and even envelopes as spaces in which Taïa reworks hegemonic colonial and absolutist narratives, I explore the poetic potential of illiteracy not as a cultural lack, relegated to silence in Morocco’s post-independence struggle for national sovereignty, but as a potent instrument of postcolonial literary critique.